Bucking The Tide

My financial advisor believes that public opinion is almost always wrong. Or at least late. He has adopted the broker's notion that the market will do whatever it must to confound the most people.

He is also a rock ribbed Republican. And he believes that all the piling on Bush and the Republican conressionale leadership is a combination of media bias and misguided public hysteria.

But I think the taste of power is turning sour on the Republican pallet.

When the Democrats ran the country, initially, under FDR, they set up elaborate and effective systems for lifting ordinary Americans out of the financial ditch into which they had been thrown by the Great Depression. Most of those systems became permanent parts of the way we run the country, although the very conservative right wing would dearly love to dismantle most or all of them.

When the Democrats had been in power for nearly a half century, what began as smart humanitarian governing began to give way to corrpution and excesses. The Republicans, quite properly, ran successfully against that abuse of power.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans, having reset the agenda for a generation, are using their power to retain power rather than govern sensibly.

What remains unclear is what or who will follow this latest abuse of power. But follow it will.